It depends how your desktop PC is running. If it is in a "waiting for login" state, XDMCP is the best way to log in. You will have to enable it in your desktop PC (and on your netbook if you want to do the reverse login). If your settings menu does not show any command like login settings, use "sudo gdmsetup" on a command line.
Logging in after that is easy, click the exit button on your task bar, click "switch user" and then choose "chooser server". You will then see all machines on your network that support XDMCP.
If you are already logged in to your PC, the above method will issue a warning, because all kinds of temp file and setting files will possibly clash. In that case, an SSH connection is by far better. There is a program called "PuTTY" that exists to use a graphic UI instead of the command-line. Either way, make sure you tell SSH to enable X connections:
And use your real user name instead of "user" and the real address of the PC instead of "address". You can omit the user@ portion if you login with the same user name. If this does not work because the X connection is not trusted, type instead:
You will get a terminal, but from that terminal you will be able to start graphic programs (like mousepad). You can push them to the background with the & character:
Do not try this in combination with the sudo command, or the password request is also pushed to the background. However, you can do the following trick:
Code:
sudo echo
sudo update-manager &
The first command will just print a newline as root. Nothing special, but is asks for your password. The second command will not ask for a password if it is issued quickly enough after the first command.
Last but not least, it IS possible to use RDP connections between ubuntu machines, but I did not manage to do so reliably. Meaning that on some machines it works and on others it does not. So I would not recommend it as a first try.
